Museums Outnumber Starbucks and McDonalds Locations in the U.S.

BY Kirstin Fawcett

December 10, 2015

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If you worry that chain eateries are slowly yet insidiously taking over the United States, rest assured—we don’t live in a cultureless corporate wasteland. In fact, new data shows that our country has more museums than Starbucks and McDonalds locations combined.

According to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, there are currently 35,000 active museums in the U.S. That’s twice as many as our country is thought to have had in the mid-1990s, TheWashington Post reports. If you’re skeptical of these numbers, know that while the study included big institutions like the Smithsonian museums, it also counted smaller, more obscure affairs—think family-owned exhibitions that earn under $10,000 per year.

The report yielded other surprising finds. For instance, there are currently more museums in Los Angeles than New York, Chicago, San Diego, or Washington, D.C. And even in rural areas, many counties have historical societies, history museums, and other local centers of learning. Of course, not all places are so lucky. Many counties in the Deep South didn’t have any museums at all, although it might be just that they didn't show up on tax records or otherwise slipped through the cracks, and so weren't included in the data.

To see which parts of the U.S. have the most museums on a per-capita basis, check out The Washington Post’s full analysis.

Switzerland’s yodeling tradition began in remote Alpine meadows, but now, new generations of students can opt to learn the folk art in a college classroom. The Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts has become the nation’s first university to offer bachelor’s and master’s degrees in yodeling, according to The Local.

Lucerne University has offered folk music degrees since 2012, but it took the department several years to find a qualified yodeling teacher. They finally settled on Nadja Räss, a famous Swiss yodeler who runs her own academy in Zurich. Under her tutelage, three to four incoming students will learn to yodel-ay-ee-oo while also taking classes in musical history, theory, and business.

Yodeling is today performed on stages, but it was once used as a method of communication among Alpine shepherds. By alternating falsetto notes with natural singing tones, they were able to communicate across mountains and round up livestock. These lyric-less cries developed into songs by the 19th century.

Today, the technique is no longer just for shepherds. Yodeling is undergoing a musical revival and occasionally enjoying five minutes of YouTube fame.

In 2014, Swiss officials announced that they intended to submit Alpine yodeling for consideration to UNESCO’s World Heritage list, along with traditions like mechanical watchmaking, typography, and managing the risk of avalanches, according to The Telegraph. Due to current guidelines, countries can only supply one entry each year. At least Switzerland’s yodelers will now have new opportunities to study their craft as they await their chance to shine on the international stage.

In the rugged cloud forests of northern Oaxaca, Mexico, the Chinantecan people communicate in one of the world's most unusual languages—not by speaking, but by whistling.

In the clip below, spotted by Open Culture, Dr. Mark Sicoli of Georgetown University and David Yetman of the University of Arizona visit the region as part of an episode for PBS's In the Americas with David Yetman. Their quest is to find out how many people still speak (or rather, whistle) the tongue, which is used to communicate across the hills and valleys of the mountainous terrain. Along the way, they discover how the language has been involved in the community's rites of passage, town meetings, gender norms, and cornfields. They also get a beaming crowd of schoolchildren to whistle "I'm tired," and witness a whistled conversation about a taco. Perhaps not surprisingly, the language is in danger of dying out—unless the youngest generation can save it.

As special as the language is, the Chinantecan whistlers of Oaxaca aren't alone: 42 examples of whistled human tongues have been documented, in the Amazon, Turkey, Greece, and the Canary Islands, to name just a few spots. The languages are usually found in places with high slopes or thick forests, where regular spoken communication is tricky. Whistling, it turns out, isn't just for the birds.